Tyrosine kinase inhibitors that target anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) have greatly improved the survival of patients with ALK-rearranged non-small-cell lung cancer, but they are insufficient to achieve a complete cure. A newly developed vaccine elicited a strong immune response specifically against ALK that eradicated primary tumors and prevented the onset of metastatic disease in mice.
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References
Chiarle, R., Voena, C., Ambrogio, C., Piva, R. & Inghirami, G. The anaplastic lymphoma kinase in the pathogenesis of cancer. Nat. Rev. Cancer 8, 11–23 (2008). A review article that describes the biology of ALK-driven cancers.
Schneider, J. L., Lin, J. J. & Shaw, A. T. ALK-positive lung cancer: a moving target. Nat. Cancer 4, 330–343 (2023). A review article that describes the state of the art for therapy and targeting resistance in patients with ALK-rearranged NSCLC.
Voena, C. et al. Efficacy of a cancer vaccine against ALK-rearranged lung tumors. Cancer Immunol. Res. 3, 1333–1343 (2015). This paper reports the efficacy of a DNA-based vaccine in a transgenic model of ALK-rearranged lung cancer.
Liu, H. et al. Structure-based programming of lymph-node targeting in molecular vaccines. Nature 507, 519–522 (2014). This paper reports a method to potently increase the immunogenicity of peptide-based cancer vaccines.
Mahadevan, N. R. et al. Intrinsic immunogenicity of small cell lung carcinoma revealed by its cellular plasticity. Cancer Discov. 11, 1952–1969 (2021). This paper reports approaches and drugs that can be used to increase the expression of MHC-I molecules in cancer cells.
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This is a summary of: Mota, I. et al. ALK vaccination restores the immunogenicity of ALK-rearranged non-small cell lung cancer. Nat. Cancer https://doi.org/10.1038/s43018-023-00591-2 (2023).
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A vaccine to treat ALK+ lung cancer and prevent metastatic disease. Nat Cancer 4, 933–934 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43018-023-00592-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43018-023-00592-1